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About the making of brick and stone reliefs

The making techniques of brick and stone reliefs are a combination of yang ke — where the design projects from the surface; yin ke — the opposite of yang ke; shallow embossment, etc. Most of the reliefs came from wooden molds, some were directly carved onto brick and stone and others were painted.

Square or rectangular in shape, each brick or stone relief usually formed a picture on its own, while others comprised two pictures – one located in the upper part and the other in the lower part. The relief subjects included such activities as harvesting, salt-making, picking lotus seeds, hunting as well as banquets, singing and dancing, acrobatics , outings and fairy tales. The reliefs featured a large variety of picture arrangements and simple yet vivid outlines.

The reliefs we see today mostly come from the tombs of the Eastern Han Dynasty in Southwest China’s Sichuan Province. For the discoveries made in the tombs of the Southern Dynasty in Central China’s Henan Province and the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River , the brick reliefs were mainly pieced together with several small bricks, displaying human figures and decorative patterns. Brick and stone reliefs, which were also featured in architectural garden designs built by the later generations, mostly featured a combination of embossment and round carvings.

Distribution of brick and stone reliefs in China

The scale and artistic level of a relief in a tomb reflects its owner’s social position. Most of the brick and stone reliefs have been unearthed in economically and culturally developed areas abounding in plentiful stone materials, such as Henan, Shandong, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Sichuan, Jiangsu and Anhui provinces.

As a cultural center of ancient China, Shandong Province’s ruling Confucian ideas and ancient fairy tales provided the main subject matters for the reliefs, which are rich in content and themes, depicting manors, vehicles, social gatherings, hunting and war scenes, as well as views of workshops. Natural scenes with birds, animals, fish, worms, the sun, moon, stars, mountains and trees, as well as architectural designs and patterns, were drawn on the stones to add to their beauty.

The reliefs of Nanyang , Henan Province, mainly depict figures from Chinese fairy tales, lucky birds and animals, and moon pictures. Most of these reliefs were carved horizontally to create a sense of movement.

（Source: chinaculture.org）